Defying Imposed Childhood and Girlhood in Eudora Welty's The Bride of the Innisfallen

This essay traces the latent and emerging voices of children, teenagers, and young women as a uniformed pattern that dwells beneath a world dominated by adults in The Bride of the Innisfallen, and Other Stories (1955). It argues that these children and young adult figures display an agency that extends beyond the confines imposed on childhood and adolescence by adult social and cultural discourses of the time. Moving beyond the qualities of passivity, immaturity, innocence, and obedience assigned by adults, Welty's children and young women in The Bride of the Innisfallen are characterized by a sense of complexity and ambiguity, wielding a subversive force that undermines the authorial voice of the adult's story.